January 5, 2014

A Law and Literature Conference and CFP On Personhood

Welcome back to a new year at the Law and Humanities Blog! To start us off, here is an announcement, with CFP, sent to us by Yasco Horsman, one of the organizers, of an interesting law and literature conference taking place in May at the University of Leiden.

Legal
Bodies: Corpus / Persona / Communitas

CFP

15-16-17May 2014

LUCAS (the Leiden University Centre for the
Arts in Society) will host a three-day conference Legal Bodies: Corpus / Persona / Communitas on the
various ways in which literary texts and art works have represented, interrogated
or challenged juridical notions of ‘personhood’. The guiding assumption behind this conference is
that ‘personhood’ is not a (biologically) given, stable property of human beings that precedes their interaction with the
law but rather that the notion of ‘personhood’ is assigned to selected ‘bodies’ by discursive regimes, such as law, medicine,
politics, religion, and education. The
focus of this conference is on how literature, art and culture might form
domains in which the implications and scope of legal, political or medical
conceptualizations of personhood can be articulated and thought through, and in
which alternative understandings of personhood can be proposed.

The symposium broaches the question of personhood
on three different levels: of the body,
the individual and the community. Questions to be addressed could
include: From which discourses did notions of bodily integrity historically emerge?
Which social, political and medical developments are currently challenging
(violating?) these notions? How do artistic, cultural and socio-political phenomena
(such as bio-art, body horror, the right-to-die movement, biopolitics?? etc.)
invite us to rethink our notion of the human body?

What literary and rhetorical figures made it
possible to think of legal personhood in antiquity, the middle ages and the
modern era? What is the legal status of ‘not-quite persons,’ such as children,
illegal immigrants, the mentally disabled, the unborn and the undead? What could
‘animal personhood’ entail?

How
do collective bodies acquire personhood? How did art and literature represent
legal entities such as the medieval city, the seventeenth-century trade company
or the nineteenth-century corporation? Or what is the legally defined status of
sects, networks, conspiracies, and resistance movements?

The conference is organized in cooperation
with NICA (the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis) and is made
possible by LUCAS, the Leiden University Fund and NICA.

A 400-word proposal for a 20-minute paper
can be sent to Frans-Willem Korsten, Nanne Timmer and Yasco Horsman (LUCAS,
Leiden) at legalbodies@hum.leidenuniv.nl.